Versatile Amphibian

I've updated my analysis of the career path of Executive Strategy professionals with an additional piece of information - their specific role on the ExCo. As you can see, strategy is more often than not combined with other roles, in particular Corporate Development... because M&A is strategic, of course... ...or is M&A just a mechanism to enact strategy and does wrapping the two roles together make large businesses more focused on acquisition rather than organic growth? Answers on a postcard!

Here's a follow up to my earlier post on the starting point of Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) careers in the FTSE 100 and S&P 500 companies - a visualisation of two steps in their careers: their first employer or job and the job they had before they got their current position. Lots of work went into this... so any insights that you glean from the visualisation would be great to hear about :). The CSO is a crucial strategic role on the executive (!) and the owner of the tone and philosophy of decision making across much of the business, knowingly or unknowingly. Scrutiny of their experience in defining the process and language of strategic management is therefore appropriate not just amongst their executive peers, but in my view amongst shareholders. The days when being very smart and able to analyse large amounts of data were enough to be a CSO are basically gone... has the profession moved on enough to cope?

I realise it's been a while since I've had time to blog. The second half of last year turned out a bit busy. I'm putting it down to a sudden realisation in a lot of Executive teams that creative destruction applies to them too. Anyhow, here's a quick first post on something I promised last year - an analysis of where Executive Level Chief Strategy Directors start their careers. As you can see, Strategy Consulting is the most common starting point for CSOs, but perhaps not as dominant as I'd expected - just over 20% of the most senior strategists in the S&P 500 and FTSE 100 started there. More than half of those came from McKinsey, with the remainder evenly split between BCG, Bain and Monitor. Why did I do this analysis? Primarily because I'm interested in how businesses set up their strategic decision-making culture. For me, the main role of the strategist is to facilitate the process of developing, realising and reflecting on strategic decisions. To ...

As promised in my update on the research I'm doing on executive team roles and configurations , here is the first deep dive into an industry. I've chosen to start with Retail for a couple of reasons. First - selfishly - I have some ongoing cases that can make use of the data. Second, retail is a nice, simple business to understand. True, many companies make it complex to manage and understand, but relative to many other sectors retail is very easy. You buy products (some or all of which you may have designed), you move them into a market in which there is demand and then you sell them for more than you bought them for. Sure, there are many twists on this ('total lifetime value', as an excuse for discounting, for example), but fundamentally, you buy, you ship, you sell for more than your costs. You would think that with such a well understood model that there would be a consistent 'best' configuration for both leadership and the organisation that those people l...

Back in February I embarked on a new research project, looking at the configuration of executive teams today and how they might change in the future . Working in London, my first thought was to use the FTSE 100 as a data set. Although it generated some interesting results and a lot of conversation (thanks to the many of you who sent me thoughts, involved me in conversations on the topic and so on), the FTSE 100 proved a slightly frustrating set of companies to research. There were two reasons for this. First, 100 companies represents too small a set to give good coverage on all industries, particularly when the natural slant in the FTSE 100 towards areas such as resources and financial services is taken into account. Second, it turns out that UK listed companies are actually relatively untransparent. Fully a quarter of the UK's largest PLCs publish no information on their management team, their biographies and their roles. Although I was able to fill in some of the gaps through ...